The Multicolr Search Lab site lets you search through 3 million Flickr images for those that match a particular color. You can pick one or more colors from a swatch on that web page and it will display Flickr image thumbnails that contain the color (or colors) you pick. Assuming the photographer allows use of the images, you could use them to jazz up your web site with color-coordinated graphics. Of course, you still need to find one that suits your content.

If you're not satisfied with the 144 colors offered, you can easily customize the tool to add the exact colors on your web page. For example, RSS4Lib uses three main colors: orange (#f1671f), dark blue-gray (#a3b8cc), and light blue-gray (#e6e2f2). By adding these to the site's URL, as in this sample, I can get a customized set of images that match RSS4Lib's color scheme.

This was generated from the following URL:
http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/#colors=f1671f,a3b8cc,e6e2f2;

If you wanted to use your own colors, simply replace the 6-character color codes (in my example, the bolded f1671f, a3b8cc, and e6e2f2) with the colors you want to use. Add more by separating them with commas (no spaces!). End the list of colors with a semicolon.

Do you ever subscribe to RSS feeds that have huge amounts of information, just to get the occasional post that mentions a particular topic or two? Yeah, me too. FeedSifter is just the tool for us. Enter an RSS feed URL and one or more words or phrases, and it will build you a version of the RSS feed that contains only entries matching one or more of your requested words. It allows for basic Boolean searching. Words or phrases entered on one line are joined by "AND"; words or phrases on separate lines are joined by "OR."

A few examples:

• New York Times sports news about the Red Sox


• CNN Top Stories that contain either 'McCain' and 'Obama' (both words) or contain the word 'elections'


• RSS4Lib posts that mention FeedSifter (nicely recursive, huh?)

The resulting page is, itself, an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your aggregator or save as a live bookmark in your browser. Or incorporate the sifted feed into a web page using Google's RSS embedding tool. I can see an obvious use for this tool at the library reference desk. This makes an easy way to set up a quick-and-dirty current awareness feed for patrons, based on news services or journal table of contents, that can tell them when something new has been published in a narrow area.

TinyPaste is a tool that does for blocks of text what TinyURL does for URLs: Give you a nice, short, URL to pass along, rather than the full-length one for the page. (A TinyURL example: http://tinyurl.com/3f94fe is much shorter than the full URL for the page you get to.)

So TinyPaste lets you copy a block of text, paste it into a form at tinypaste.com, and get a similarly short URL in return. See http://tinypaste.com/5172c -- which is the entire text of this blog post. There is also a Firefox extension that makes TinyPaste available from the right-click menu, so any text you see in your browser can be highlighted and turned into a TinyPaste URL.

TinyPaste is handy for getting long blocks of text into services like Twitter or a Facebook status (by putting in the TinyPaste URL rather than the full text), but it comes with several drawbacks. All formatting (other than line breaks) disappears completely. So do links. And most disturbing, to me, is the utter lack of indication of where the original came from. In the web page version it is, of course, possible to manually insert the URL or other attribution into the text before creating the TinyURL. For the Firefox plugin, though, this can -- and I think should -- be automatic.

Issue 3 of the Code4Lib Journal was published today:

• Editorial Introduction (Ron Peterson)


• Alternative Solutions for Off-Campus Authentication (Rebekah Kilzer, Elizabeth L. Black and James Muir)


• Distributed Version Control and Library Metadata (Galen M. Charlton)


• The Planets Testbed: Science for Digital Preservation (Brian Aitken, Petra Helwig, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Lindley, Eleonora Nicchiarelli, Seamus Ross)


• Bringing Sheet Music to Life: My Experiences with OMR (Andrew Bullen)


• Building an Archival Collections Portal (Terry Catapano, Joanna DiPasquale, and Stuart Marquis)


• Developing an Academic Image Collection with Flickr (Jeremy McWilliams)


• Making Patron Data Work Harder: User Search Terms as Access Points? (Jason A. Clark)


• Collecting Virtual Reference Statistics with an IM Chat-Bot (Mason R.K. Hall)


• WordPress as a Content Management System for a Library Web Site: How to Create a Dynamically Generated Subject Guide (Joshua Dodson)

Feedbooks is a site that turns an RSS feed -- your own or your favorite daily read -- into a PDF file for offline reading. A sample of Feedbooks' PDF options for RSS4Lib's feed can be found here: . It includes PDF files formatted for A4 paper, the Cybook & Sony Reader, iLiad, and "Custom PDF," which is in this case standard-sized U.S. paper.

The tool works quickly, generating a PDF on the fly. First, set up an account at Feedbooks. Then, create a "News" item and enter the RSS feed you wish to subscribe to. The system defaults to A4 paper size; there is not a default 8.5" x 11" size. (You can set the Custom PDF page size to this selecting the "custom settings" link and entering the page size in millimeters: 216 by 279 millimeters.) The resulting PDF file can then be downloaded; a link is provided for bookmarking.

Other customizations are font (from a handful of common fonts), font size, and line height. The font choice only applies to the item content, not to the item title. Feeds are displayed one per page, which leaves a lot of white space (a solution I prefer to that used by FeedJournal, which I reviewed in December 2007). The PDF download has a table of contents with page numbers, though the page numbers themselves are not displayed on subsequent pages. I also noticed that some posts in the Feedbooks PDF version lost their paragraphs and were presented as one long block of text. The site seems to reproduce all the items in the RSS feed; the RSS4Lib RSS feed has 15 items, all of which are in the Feedbooks feed.